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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 09 2017, @07:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the found-more-exploitable-workers-elsewhere dept.

The World Socialist Web Site reports

[October 3], Toyota wound up production at its plant in Altona, a working-class suburb in southwest Melbourne. The closure marks the end of the company's 54-year Australian manufacturing operation. The shutdown left 2,700 workers unemployed, and threatens tens of thousands more jobs in the car components industry.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), which covers car workers, previously oversaw the shutdown of Ford's production in Melbourne and Geelong in October last year, eliminating the 600 remaining jobs. Once Holden closes its operation in South Australia, in less than three weeks, a further 944 workers will be left unemployed, and car production will cease in Australia.

A University of Adelaide study in 2014 predicted this would result in the destruction of some 200,000 jobs across the country.

The string of shutdowns is an indictment of successive Labor governments, at the state and federal level, and the trade unions. Having imposed round after round of sackings, speed-ups and cuts to conditions, the unions, functioning as an industrial police force of the car corporations, have done everything they can to ensure "orderly closures".

[...] after extracting vast profits from their employees, Ford, Toyota, and Holden, have decided their Australian operations are not providing a sufficient return for their ultra-wealthy shareholders. They have thus ended manufacturing, wreaking social havoc on devastated working-class communities.

This is part of a global restructuring by the major car producers, aimed at taking advantage of poverty-level wages and economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs. Workers in every part of the world, from Asia and the US and Europe, are paying the price.

[...] The unions, taking their nationalist and pro-capitalist program to its logical conclusion, support this global race to the bottom, helping companies pit workers against each other along national lines. The AMWU, working with Toyota and the major companies, drove down wages and conditions over the past 20 years, seeking to ensure Australian car manufacturing was "internationally competitive".

[...] This is part of a broader corporate offensive against jobs, wages, and conditions, following the collapse of the mining boom, amid a deepening crisis of Australian capitalism. Massive job cuts have been imposed in the energy sector, telecommunications, and virtually every other industry.

A Roy Morgan survey in August found that more than 10 percent of the national workforce, more than 1.2 million people, were out of work.


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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:57PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:57PM (#579511)

    Wow, talk about cherry-picking.

    Mondragon is all too happy to pay its non-owner staff low wages, for part-time work, and can them when it suits them. They've effectively created a two-tier system.

    They're also operating in a distinctly socialist-light environment, in which individual accumulation of capital is expressly supported.

    ... and as for socialism being somehow "better" there's no mention of individuals freelancing outside the coopera-corporate system. Fuck them, amirite?

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  • (Score: 1, TouchĂ©) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:52AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:52AM (#579524)

    Mondragon is all too happy to pay its non-owner staff

    Everyone working at Mondragon is an equal owner of the company.
    That's what "worker-owned cooperative" means.
    Nitwit.
    I've repeatedly explained this for three and a half fucking years.
    Are you new here or were you in the "special" class at school?

    low wages

    A living wage.
    In a worker-owned co-op, the worker-owners democratically decide how the profits will be used.
    If you think they are going to screw themselves, you're just stupid.

    for part-time work

    Even on a reduced schedule, they still make more than enough to pay the bills.
    N.B. In France, EVERYONE has a 35 hour workweek and they do just fine there as well.

    a distinctly socialist-light environment

    You are very poorly educated.
    It's clear that you haven't bothered with the autodidact thing either.
    You have, however, uncritically swallowed a whole bunch of Cold War bullshit.

    in which individual accumulation of capital is expressly supported

    Capitalism and Socialism are OWNERSHIP models.
    In the first, there are lots of non-owners; in the latter, everybody is an EQUAL owner.
    The first is an Autocracy; the latter is a Democracy.

    Thanks for playing our game.
    Collect your dunce cap on the way out.
    You can now go back to your wage-slave job and continue to allow your Capitalists overlords to exploit you.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:32AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:32AM (#579541)

      So, denial is cool.

      And if you want to live in denial, never google as follows, and if you do, then DEFINITELY never read the linked content:

      http://www.google.com/search?q=non-owner+workers+mondragon [google.com]

      In your happy world of denial, you can continue to fantasise that I'm a poorly-educated wage-slave. I'm sure you'll feel very happy with that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:59AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:59AM (#579581)

        Mondragon makes every attempt to promote from within.
        It is an extremely rare occurrence when they have to bring someone new in to get stuff done.
        My understanding is that when someone new is brought in, he has to pay the modest ante just like everybody else in the company and he then becomes a worker-owner.

        ...and your crap link brings up nothing to dispel my vision of how the company works.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:15AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:15AM (#579587)

          The parent post is a glowing illustration of what we call "confirmation bias". Things that support the favoured view are obviously true. Contrary evidence is manifestly false, or not worth investigating, and certainly not worth believing or taking seriously.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:35AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:35AM (#579600)

            ...and quote from that.

            ...or provide a better search link that actually supports your supposition.
            ...and which will get through the S/N comments engine without being molested (e.g. quote marks stripped).

            -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @05:01PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @05:01PM (#581867)

              Not the OP, but what the hell, a guy (or gal) gives you a google link and you can't even follow it up? Wow, talk about your entitled little basement socialists.

              Direct quote from a pretty friendly website: "Many cooperatives in the group not only abroad, but also outside of the Basque Country in the rest of Spain, make use of a significant number of non-member employees (Mondragon’s rule in the Basque Country is min 85% worker-member), especially in periods of high demand or season."

              Sounds a lot like temporary workers being brought on and tossed out to me. There's more: "The Eroski Group grew rapidly and could not keep up with the speed of expansion, and, hence, a larger and larger percentage of the Eroski work force came to consist of non-member workers in conventionally-owned subsidiaries." So, yeah, there's that. Bought subsidiaries. Conventionally-employed people.

              And then of course there's the lobster-pot thing of not being able to transfer your capital account. Why the hell not? It's yours, right? No, it's not yours, it's the cooperative's. And you get the privilege of being one of them, if that's your thing.

              Hell, they even had to finally admit that certain kinds of professionals were kind of necessary, and that they would kind of demand higher wages, and then relax their rules for that. Go figure, the market for workers really does matter.